Summary
Yeah! Science! While it’s pleasing to see a science-positive action film, the rest of this film struggles with a scattered tone and a seriously gung-ho attitude.
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of cinema, it’s either killer robots from the future or some kind of environmental catastrophe. In Chris McKay’s (The LEGO Batman Movie) time travel action film THE TOMORROW WAR, past and present collide in something slightly more awkward than a first date during a pandemic.
In the not-too-distant future of December 2022, high school teacher and former military guy Dan Forester (Chris Pratt) feels that his life is going nowhere. While watching the World Cup (no spoilers!) with his wife (a criminally underused Betty Gilpin) and daughter, human soldiers from the year 2051 arrive to tell them about a future alien invasion. With humanity on the brink of losing, they’ve started to recruit soldiers from the past.
When Dan is drafted, he goes through basic training and is sent to the future — but something goes wrong. Landing in the wrong place, he and a scrappy handful of survivors must fight the future aliens in a post-apocalyptic Miami Beach. At least that’s the plot for the next ten minutes, until a series of random events bring Dan face-to-face with his future daughter Col. Forester (Yvonne Strahovski), deal with his own daddy issues with his estranged anti-government father (J. K. Simmons), and defeat the aliens with a virus or something.
Taking place in a kind of Venn diagram slice of Independence Day and The Terminator, the promise of the first act quickly gives way to an otherwise by-the-numbers planet saver. All the elements are there: future war, child of the saviour of humanity, time travel, a clumsy analogy with climate change, and an unlikely small chance to infect the aliens. The biggest issue is that the film takes a while to set itself up as time travelling Starship Troopers, and then promptly abandons the high concept almost immediately in favour of something more linear and contemporary.
In its place is a collection of set-pieces across present(ish) day Earth, where the running and gunning gets a little tedious. There’s a race to find a MacGuffin, throwaway lines in the first act become vital clues in the second, and it all culminates in a big ol’ confrontation in a snow-capped tundra. Mind you, the third act is largely saved by the awesome presence of a grizzled old J.K. Simmons, finally putting the beard and muscles of his Justice League regime to good use.
THE TOMORROW WAR doesn’t quite live up to its own title, so perhaps the international titles of Ghost Draft and Ghost Soldiers are slightly more appropriate. They look formidable on the surface, and have all the guns and bluster of a major release, but on close inspection they’re all a bit ethereal.
2021 | USA | DIRECTOR: Chris McKay | WRITER: Zach Dean | CAST: Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, J. K. Simmons, Betty Gilpin, Sam Richardson, Edwin Hodge | DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon Studios | RUNNING TIME: 138 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 2 July 2021 (Prime)
